Rich Lowry of National Review Online tackles the overheated rhetoric surrounding Republicans’ latest health care reform proposal.
The Brezhnev Doctrine said that the Soviet empire could only expand and never give back its gains. A domestic version of the doctrine has long applied to the welfare state — and never so brazenly as in the debate over the Republican health-care bill.
Its reforms to Medicaid are portrayed as provisions to all but forcibly expel the elderly from nursing homes and send poor children to the workhouse. Bernie Sanders has called the bill “barbaric,” a word that once was reserved for, say, chattel slavery or suttee, but is now considered appropriate for a change in the Medicaid funding formula.
The Republican health bills have two major elements on Medicaid: rolling back the enhanced funding for the Obama Medicaid expansion, and over time instituting a new per capita funding formula for the program. The horror.
The Democrats now make it sound as if the Obama expansion is part of the warp and woof of Medicaid. In fact, it was a departure from the norm in the program, which since its inception has been, quite reasonably, limited to poor children, pregnant women, the disabled, and the ailing elderly. Obamacare changed it to make a priority of covering able-bodied adults.
